October 21st was an ordinary day; I woke up went to school then after school had polo practice. My friend and I were planning on going to the Hendricken football game after practice that Friday but our coach was so late that by the time practice was over the game had already started, making it not worth it to even go. But my brothers, they had gone to the game as always. They were always more involved with things than me and I didn’t mind but I had always wanted to be involved with them, it has been that way my whole life. Anything they did I wanted to be involved in because when you are twins, like my brothers, you have someone to do everything with and I just wanted to be involved instead of sitting on the sidelines of everything. So they were at the game and well I, I was sitting at my friend’s house per usual. I didn’t mind hanging out with Jenna, she was my best friend for three years and we were always at each other’s houses. We were both kind of bummed that we didn’t get to go to the game, I more than her because she was always shy and didn’t really want to go places where she wouldn’t know anyone. So we just stayed at her house all night.

Before my brothers had left that morning they told me they were staying the night at my nana’s house instead of driving all the way home from the game. I understood because after all it is a forty-five to fifty minute drive depending on traffic and who wants to do that at nine-thirty on a Friday night. So that night I didn’t worry about them because I was aware that they were going to be fine. Later that night I had woken up at around midnight in a drenching sweat and utterly sick to my stomach but I had no idea why, I couldn’t find a reason so I went back to bed. A few hours later, around three-thirty in the morning, my friend’s mom came barreling into the room in a complete panic. I had no idea what was going to come next or whom she was going to speak to, she sat down on the bed next to me. Finally she grabbed me in her arms, I had no idea what was going on, and said, “Abby your brothers were in a car accident and had to be taken to the hospital, they’re in critical care in the ICU unit.” After she had said that she held me and started to cry, but I didn’t cry I just sat there confused. I went into complete denial and told her that it couldn’t have been my brothers because they had slept at my nana’s and were all right, it had to have been someone else, not them.

A few hours later I found myself walking down a sidewalk in providence towards the Hospital. The whole walk I just remember being in a sort of fog, completely zoned out only focusing on my brothers. Walking into the ICU was a life changing moment because there I saw my father and mother in tears; I had never seen them like this before. I looked around and saw pity on all of the nurses’ faces as they realized whom I was there to see. First they took me to my brother James who was not as severely injured as Chris. They told me he would be asleep and had some broken bones and a very bad knee injury, which had already been fixed. Walking into the room and seeing my brother laying there was very surreal, mostly because I could not do anything but talk to him. When I was done visiting James they brought me to Chris, they warned me that he was going to look very different and would not look like the brother I had known my entire life. They told me he had fractured the whole left side of his face and broken his back and nose. He also had severe internal injuries and a traumatic brain injury. He was hooked up to several machines all doing different jobs to help him hold on. He was also in a coma and would not come out of it until about five weeks later.

It became a routine, going to the hospital after school everyday, it was embedded into my brain such like the one of getting up and going to school every day. Five days after the accident James was released since he had minor injuries but Chris, he would stay there for another three months. Every day would become the same as the last, an endless routine of checking on to see if he would wake up or if he had improved. When he did wake up it was not the same as before, he had this blank stare and couldn’t speak. He had a hard time writing and had lost so much muscle; his legs became almost the size of my forarm. It was shocking but no one really minded. He wasn’t allowed to eat real food but every now and then we would sneak him a tiny piece of Italian ice, he loved that.

We spent a lot of time there; I began to see people come and go. Some with life threatening diseases like cancer and others with just a bad case of the flu mixed with first time diabetics. It was an unusual crowd but it was a source of distraction from my thoughts. My thoughts were actually my biggest enemy during this time. I had always thought about what if I was with them? What if they had one more red light to slow them down? What if this never happened? What if it was the car in front of them not my brothers? I began to get very sad, I was living without my mother and I had no one to talk to who really could help me. My dad was just as sad as me but he knew he had to be strong for all of us. I got to a point where I began to not eat; I had no appetite and just was never in the mood. I began to do all sorts of things that would distract me from the pain. Good things and not so good things, I never told anyone what I was doing, it was my secret and I kind of liked that because my brothers were no secret; they were all over the internet and some newspapers. I had to deal with people calling them really terrible things, saying they should go to jail because the other car’s victims didn’t make it. All over there was negativity and I couldn’t handle it. It drove me to have bad thoughts because my brother, Chris, was struggling with life and the other one was living with my nana and I never saw him but I knew he was just as broken as me.

When Chris moved hospitals, he went from Providence to Boston. Now my mother was even further away from me and she would be for another four or five months. We spent Christmas of 2011 in Boston eating Chinese food in a conference room on the eighth floor of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. This was not what any of us wanted but we were all together and we were as happy as life let us be at that point.

After that Christmas in Boston something started to change in me. I needed to find an outlet; I didn’t know what to do with all of this pain and sadness. I couldn’t take it out in my sports like other kids do because it’s not in my nature, I don’t add my problems to my competitive drive. I started to do stuff I wish I hadn’t but at the same time wouldn’t change the past; it helped me in a way. On the day my mother found out what I had done to myself she was so upset. She said to me, “You are here making scars while your brother is trying to heal and hide his.” This very thing she said opened my eyes. She blamed herself for what I had done; she blamed it on her being a bad mother and not being there for me for only some weekends over the past six months. After this day I realized that I needed to stop being so upset, that I was still loved and that I didn’t need as much attention as my brother.

When Chris finally came home my family’s problems just didn’t poof into thin air and disappear. We had different, new ones now. It was as though we just brought a baby home for the first time from the hospital, everything was new; our routines, what we did, where we went and so on. He struggled to get back into his old ways but his friends helped him, which took some pressure off of me. But when James went off to college and Chris stayed back to repeat his senior year, this is when things got a little difficult. His friends had gone off to college too leaving him behind. This pained me everyday, I cried and cried because I knew his pain; I could see it and could barley do a thing about it. I would take him to football games and his ‘friends’ would just ditch him and I just couldn’t take it, seeing him by himself all alone sitting alone in a crowded bleacher. So I did what any best sister in the world would do, or so I thought. I called my friend who had ditched my brother and set him straight. I held back the tears as I told him how he had some nerve ditching him, leaving him by himself when all he wanted to do was be involved again. It was a hard phone call to make but I did it, I thought it was the best thing I could do for him. After that I saw a small change in the way they treated him. They all were also slightly terrified of me, which was entertaining.

I feel like sometimes I am the protector of him, three years ago I would not expect to be so strong. I have a new sense of guardianship over not only Chris but James as well. I know how fragile they are and that they can break easily. Because I have literally seen them broken, all over.

This experience has opened my eyes to things some people have no clue of. I’ve seen things that some people only experience by watching those doctor TV shows. Now I know what real pain is, not the pain you feel when you fall but when you are broken. I know love, not the kind that they portray in those sappy movies with Ryan Gosling. I know joy, and not the kind when you get that present you always wanted. In a way I am sort of glad this happened to my family and I, though I would not wish it upon anybody else in this world, but it has changed me for the better. I know and feel differently and wouldn’t be capable of that if I had never been the sister of two survivors of a head-on car accident, or the sister of a boy who struggles every day with a TBI (traumatic brain injury) due to the accident. This broke me but it also in a way it rebuilt me but also made me a stronger me.